I’ll admit, when I first read Chapman, every bone in my body screamed to contradict him. So much of what he describes–from the actual meat and potatoes of the article to the purple prose he uses to elevate it to–seems to come from a place of privilege. He describes a library with “sanctified halls” and rows upon rows of books where the value of knowledge can be seen in the “rich bindings and marbled end pages.” I have been in libraries such as these. I’ll admit that, when I had the privilege of walking into the Bodleian library in Oxford, I reveled under the awe-inspiring arches and longed to touch the ancient, protected texts they kept tucked out of the reach of curious visitors. Knowledge should be awe-inspiring and, sometimes, we give it the honor of those kinds of visual cues.

But all of Chapman’s descriptions bucked against the expectations of my most desperate students. He admitted the convenience of being able to create bibliographies in the dorm room or office, but lamented that students weren’t willing to take the time to search through the physical copies in the library, content to be lazy and only go with those papers which had a “full-text” option online. He’s not wrong. I’ve been guilty of this, too. But what about the student with two part-time jobs and a full course load? What about the first-generation college student who isn’t sure where to start when faced with aisles of books bound in generic, canvas covers, but knows how to navigate a search engine better than Chapman admits he does? Wanting ease of access isn’t necessarily lazy, and it’s not like our lazy students would be guaranteed to try harder in a physical location–many of them are likely to grab the first books that seem to match and never go back, regardless of the fit. Lazy will be lazy regardless of the venue.

But even though every example Chapman gave only made me want to argue more, I didn’t like finding myself arguing against libraries. I don’t mean the strange, dream-like versions he seems to be valuing, but the cherished, tired, neighborhood versions I grew up with. The ones that smelled vaguely of dust and stale coffee and maybe a bit of mold. The ones with only a handful of aisles, with books that had been worn down by too many hands, but there were a few comfy chairs set up for anyone able to linger a bit longer. The ones that let me check out 15 books for a two week period and didn’t blink an eye when my mom let me bring them back 3 days short because I’d already sped through my latest collection. I love libraries. I love what they offer to communities. And it’s true that, in print form, students have access to some texts they don’t online…sometimes because they haven’t been translated to digital texts yet, but just as often because their school hasn’t subscribed to get behind that particular paywall. Because, for all that the internet could be an equalizer, it isn’t. Not completely. If knowledge isn’t limited physically, it’s limited financially, parsing out availability to those with wallets large enough to pay for it.

Chapman’s arguments seem weak at best–the protests of someone emotionally lamenting the loss of something that 90% of the world will never experience–and they acted as an interesting introduction to Schauer’s conversation about how women are often rationalized out of tech fields. When the status quo is challenged, its defendants will always come out, tears flowing and arms reaching for the golden days when things were done “properly.” But as digital practices become more common, I don’t want to become complacent in my acceptance…and I don’t want to ignore that some of Chapman’s arguments (however misguided I think they are) still hold weight. Technology is not a panacea. It’s not a replacement. It’s not the herald of a utopia. It’s just a tool, with all the ups and downs and strengths and weaknesses that entails, and it’s Schauer and other men and women like her who are responding (I believe) more effectively. Blind acceptance or irrate denial get us nowhere fast. It’s the rhetorical understanding and the ability to think of the possibilities (expected or not) that will let us get the most out of each step of our technological progress.

In Tinkering with Technological Skill, Ann Brady Aschauer made me wonder more about the “add women and stir” solution (15) to address the (dis)belief that women lack certain technological skill as it presented itself in my ENGL106e class this semester.

My students are unlike any other students I have had. While there are larger systemic problems with the class structure and its partnership with TECH120 (don’t get me started), The treatment of the three young women in my class has increased in the last few weeks. While I am always attentive to the needs of my students, historically (As proven by this article) and currently the marginalization of women in technical fields was something I knew I needed to look out for. The three young women (PSL, POC, and SHY), are, for the most part, ignored by their male peers. POC and PSL have bonded well and use each other as support, but SHY is oftentimes ignored by her male peers and by the two female peers. Despite the fact that SHY is smart and has a larger technological skill than many other first years in the class, she has (so far) been passed up for each tech-based small group class activity.

The gender techno divide is a real one that we can observe in our every day. The micro-community of the classroom versus “the field” of technology are equally important for allowing female students like SHY to be a part of their discipline. The closing comments for Brady Aschauer echo this overlap, “both communities can benefit from an increased understanding of how social expectations and constraints influence the construction of technological skill and use” (21). The way that PSL, POC, and SHY are brought into the community of practice for the College of Technology will be important for determining their future success and development.

Redefining technology, as the article suggests, only matters when industry responds to new definitions. So, sorry, Brady Aschauer, you’re wrong. Idealistic, but wrong.

I find myself getting hung up on Chapman’s closing remarks in “A Luddite in Cyberland, Or How to Avoid Being Snared by the Web”:

One often hears that the potential for the Web is great. And, I would agree. The Web has the potential to sacrifice the quality of sources used by students in research for the ready availability of Web sources. It has the potential to distract students away form the analysis and reflection at the heart of a college education as they focus on the superficial appearance of documents. It has the potential to squander the precious resource of student time by focusing on the mechanics of Web-site production instead of on the act of writing. We may be able to avoid the Siren call of the Web as we avoided the false promises of televised classes in the 1960s and computer tutorials in the 1970s. With a little luck, the Web may never be able to reach its potential. (252)

I have to say that I don’t really know how I feel about all this. On one hand, as someone who often feels like a Luddite herself, I can kind of empathize with the challenge of keeping up with technology and the feeling that “students too often settle for inferior sources” (249). But it seems that more and more “superior” sources are becoming available digitally (at least, since Chapman wrote this article), although perhaps access to and availability of such sources depends on the institution/university through which students/teachers are operating. The hope, though, that “the Web may never be able to reach its potential” seems a bit limited in its posturing as a cautionary, cynical tale—would it maybe be more helpful to critically engage, instead, with solutions for how we might make use of emerging technologies and digital media in a way that could help our students navigate these terrains more effectively?

I wonder if Aschauer’s “Tinkering with Technological Skill: An Examination of the Gendered Uses of Technological Skill: An Examination of the Gendered Uses of Technologies” might allow us to move in that direction, especially if we consider more fully her pointing out that “rather than arguing for an ahistorical, inner essence of womanhood and rejecting technology, we need to remember that femininity, masculinity, and technology are social constructs, all three of which can be resisted and reconstructed” (14). And perhaps her interrogation of femininity, masculinity, and technology as social constructs through the feminist empiricist approach that highlights the value of lived experience might complicate Chapman’s arguments, especially in that Aschauer argues, “To engage in the kind of empirical research I have suggested requires that we exchange conventional definitions of technology as a monolith for a view of it as a site for lived experience” (17). As such, I wonder if, perhaps, by further problematizing the social constructedness of gender, technology, and the intersection of both, we might continue to complicate these “conventional definitions of technology as a monolith” and unpack the manner in which all this impacts our classroom concerns.

My reaction to Chapman here was immediate, and visceral: “oh, bullshit, Chapman; change is not inherently bad!” But I’ve been trying to explore my strong reactions lately (in the hopes that will temper them?), so I re-read the beginning and tried to position myself in his perspective. Because, see, I remember the shift to web-based research. When I was in junior high and high school, I performed traditional library research for most projects. Web sites at the time were far less useful, and it wasn’t until I had LexisNexis access for my college debate team research that I understood the power online databases brought to the table. For someone trying to pull quantity to sift for quality, it was a boon.

But I never had to take a comp class, and by the time I got around to teaching one, this was just the way things were. Print-based library research had become the realm of specialists and scholars. And what Chapman says here, about students defaulting to the easiest sources they could find, whether or not they were better? As true then as now. But is that inherently a problem with the change in research types, or have we not found a way to teach students to manage time? Let me ask it this way: pre-Web and online databases, would a student have waited for a better book through Interlibrary Loan unless they were an advanced scholar? The problem, I feel, has remained the same; only the way Chapman demonizes it is different. His assumption that books and print materials are going to offer the better information speaks to his prejudice in favor of print, and what we gain in access seems, to me, to make up for any loss.

Speaking of how some things don’t change, though, the Aschauer reading just makes me tremendously sad. This was written when I was still a teenager, hinging on research from before then, and so little has changed in many ways. I can’t even make sentences about it yet.

I find the pairing of these articles a bit weird. It’s tempting to say that they are common to each other in that they provide dissenting or alternative viewpoints to the persistent drumbeat of “rah rah technology is cool” articles, but I don’t think that’s quite fair to these two articles individually. Aschauer, particularly, is more redemptive of technology in that she seeks to revise the category by making it more experiential–thinking about technology as something that seamlessly integrates with our experiences in order to revise women’s relationship to it as something they possess mastery of. I’m a fan of this strategy, since it capitalizes on mastery a group already possesses and doesn’t task them with playing “catch up” as the only road to equality (as she says, that viewpoint is inherently deterministic). I like her attempt at reconciliation with Haraway. I, too, hold Haraway’s notion of the cyborg dear to me (although that’s not really what a cyborg would do, I guess), but I agree that it must come from theory and practice of everyday life, and not broad abstractions.

It’s tempting to dismiss Chapman and his admitted Ludditism, but I paused after on line in the last paragraph: “We may be able to avoid the Siren call of the Web as we avoided the false promises of televised classes in the 1960s and computer tutorials in the 1970s” (emphasis added). I know this is thinking way past what Chapman is arguing against in this article, but t made me think of, in the immediate, MOOCs. Education delivered over the TV seems like a monumentally bad idea driven by the same efficiency and monetary concerns as the recent push for widespread MOOCs and general downsizing of educators going on right now. In that context, it’s easier to see how Chapman, who I assume is an older faculty member (probably white, yes?) would see web technology as another mass broadcast system being collectively promoted as the Next Big Thing in education without any firm grasp on why and no clear vision for how. While I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong, what remains more crucially unclear if that’s a bad or good thing, either in 1999, or now.

My time in Second Life on Tuesday was a bit odd. When I created my account, I selected default everything to start, just so I could spend as much time as possible exploring what the program had to offer. I hadn’t played it since it first came out, and I remembered close to nothing about it, other than it was a kind of weird 3D chatroom. A good chunk of my time was spend trying to customize my avatar and trying to make it do something other than stand/run/fly, the commands for which were prominently displayed on the bottom of the screen. Commands for more complicated gestures seemed to be hidden within some sub-menus that took me half the class to find, and even then, when I found them, I didn’t have much drive to do anything but put on a silly outfit and dance like a fool. It was fun, but the distracting kind.

I can see Second Life potentially being helpful in the way that customizing an avatar can tell us a lot about the rhetorical choices one makes in self-representation in online spaces. I would probably opt for a more simplistic system than Second Life, which has a bit of a learning curve when it comes to changing one’s appearance. Even when I finally figured out how to change my clothing, I couldn’t preview the way anything looked without assigning it to my avatar, which overrode the last thing I wore. This made trying to find my preferred appearance a bit cumbersome.

As far as a place to conduct digital classroom discussions… A chatroom would be a lot easier and about as effective. The learning curve is far too high, and (unlike learning HTML), there really isn’t any long-term benefit to learning how to interact with Second Life. There are just better platforms that don’t require quite so much investment to use.

Unfortunately we spent most of class last time trying to find a MOO that was still active that we could actually navigate in and around. We eventually did find one, but by the time we had it half way figured out to the point where we could start doing things with it, class was over. That said, I saw a few interesting pedagogical implications of what we did and how we were doing it.

1. I’m about to start the second unit in my tech writing class which is going to be the technical description. It could be kind of cool to given the students an assignment to provide a technical description of how to actually do something with a MOO. The documentation that Amelia and I were dealing with was helpful, but not super helpful. So that could be an interesting assignment/activity for 421 students.
2. In retrospect, the struggles we went through to figure this thing out are kind of a metaphor for the writing process. (Or learning anything, really.) You struggle, it doesn’t make sense, you think pretty much everyone else is doing it better than you. Then, when you finally think you’ve got it figured out and you’ll be able to start actually doing stuff, time is up and you have to “turn it in.” But the difference was this felt more like a game and less frustrating than the writing process often feels. So why does the writing process feel so much more frustrating? Why can’t we approach it more like a game and have fun with it? Ideas to continue teasing out, I suppose.
3. Honestly, I’m still not sure I totally understand MOOs. I think there is actually a much more direct pedagogical implication into how we use them, and maybe I would have gotten it had we figured things out more quickly and actually gotten into the MOO, but for now I think I’m still on the outside.

I almost hand-wrote this in HTML, but this handy WordPress UI does such a good job of visualizing what my text will look like as I read it, i thought, “why bother?”

In all seriousness, though, the coding vs writing tension still resonates with me because I see code languages as writing languages, but I now, nearly 15 years after this debate was in full swing, wonder if that’s enough. Yes, people write with them, but how much of the learning to write with them is the equivalent of learning proper grammar so the machine will properly interpret your code, for instance? If what we’re teaching is communication and “critical thinking,” does knowing the proper syntax for HTML contribute to that directly? Probably as much as grammar does to English, which is to say a lot, but in ways that are imperceptible to the reader unless it’s wrong, and modern FYC tends to only cover grammar when absolutely necessary. So the question I’m left with is, why would we do that so much for markup languages like HTML, for instance?

I think the answer lies in the fact that significantly fewer students come to FYC knowing HTML than English, as it represents a weakness in their functional literacy in the 21st century which, we keep telling ourselves, will ultimately draw up lines of power between those who can “code” and those who can’t (like us). Ergo, teaching coding and web markup can be seen as part of our charge to prepare students for writing in their lives henceforth.

If I seem super cynical on this point, it’s probably because I want to keep myself invested in the argument by questioning myself. I particularly sympathize with the Mauriello, Pagnucci, and Winner piece and it’s lamentation of class time lost to technical instruction in search of expanding the domain of composition, and the need to create research networks to work on the problem. When I teach my Minecraft narrative remediation assignment, I routinely lose 2-3 class periods overall to technical problems, either with firewall, backup, or networking issues, and I have to constantly remind myself that it’s in service of the students’ enhanced literacy that views language, narrative, and code together and not separated, not just for their good but for the (STEM) disciplines they will go into. At a time when people are worried for the future of the humanities in the face of STEM dominance and corporatization of the University (and if you’re not than you should be), I think teaching with digital composition mediums, particularly game design, is one of the better defensive moves composition can make to not only a) show relevance of humanities to STEM but b) keep humanities values, like critical thinking, argumentation, ethics, emotion, and logic, alive in STEM, which is what we really want, at the end of the day. Instead of retreating back to text-and-text writing, purposeful integration of technology into humanities will achieve integration of humanities into tech via the students that join the STEM workforces. In that paradigm, we are “contributing” on par with technical instruction. If we treat our own field as a “service” that provides “value added” to STEM fields by teaching writing divorced from “weird” composition mediums, there will be nothing to stop administration from fully transforming humanities professors and adjuncts into contingent labor, replaceable with the drop of a hat.

After chatting with Alisha, Bianca, Sam, & Sherri on Tuesday, my mind is pretty much on overload with the all of the possibilities gaming brings to the ESL classroom. Obvs it’s not new research (CALL does a lot with gaming these days), but I’ve always felt on the outside of that conversation because I don’t self-identify as a “Gamer” and could never really figure out how something my parents fought over could have educational benefits beyond building thumb dexterity. Thankfully, that’s starting to shift.

I’m highly interested in the endless possibilities gaming brings to SLA and what exactly that looks like: Learning vocabulary, interacting in a new social discourse, building audience awareness, analyzing rhetorical devices, negotiating meaning, etc. I’d like to see what having an ESL composition classroom with a certain genre of games or a game as a theme for an entire semester does for their writing and language skills. Since I didn’t know Dungeons and Dragons was a originally a paper game (don’t judge me too harshly), I especially favor the idea of scaffolding from a paper/board version to a system version of a game for a semester – but I’m not opposed to just tossing them in (that’s literally how I learned to swim) and seeing where the struggle takes us (I didn’t die). Since I am new to this gaming world, and am trying my hand at playing some myself, I can certainly see the possible frustrations that ESL students are likely to experience when trying to navigate a world that doesn’t bend quite as easily to our rule of thumb; I can also imagine the lively conversations, descriptive pieces of writings, and the leaps in learning that are possible from stepping out of one’s comfort zone.

The biggest worry I have, honestly, would be transfer and finding clear-cut objectives that demonstrate the benefits of such a class to my students.

Once again, I feel like I’ve overlooked articles that articulated significant questions about digital technologies, which I’ve been asking or discussed, that are still ongoing today. In particular, the question of whether to teach students to code HTML, use WYSIWYG, use templates, or some combination of the above, is no less controversial these days (and there are staunch proponents for each option). And as usual, some people still question whether such work should count as “writing” at all, or whether it falls under the domain of Composition, Computer Science, or someplace else. Personally, I think it counts as Composition and writing. But I’m also biased having been an undergrad TA for a web design course that I helped revise. Part of me would have liked to have read these articles 6 years ago, but part of me is also glad to have encountered questions of how to teach web design through experience.

Today, I also wonder how contested issues of teaching HTML or not in a Composition class are. I wonder this because I’ve tried to keep up with front-end web technologies since I was in high school, but I’ve fallen a little behind since HTML 5 and CSS 3 released and mobile devices changed the web. Given the proliferation of social media and the increasing complexity of web development, I wonder how much longer students outside of dedicated web design/UX design programs will feel a need or desire to learn HTML and front-end web technologies. Even with what I know of web design, for most things I would be likely to publish online, it’s faster these days to modify a WordPress site than to code one from scratch, or to just modify a template. Unless I really needed to develop a custom site for a very specific reason, it probably wouldn’t be worth the level of complexity and time it takes to put together a good web site. But, that knowledge of the underlying code comes in handy when things break, or need to be strategically broken. But I might just be getting old and bitter, and a little cynical about people who don’t believe in web writing as important to Composition and writing studies?